Reviews
Robert Beale
Rodula Gaitanou’s production of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos is a hugely entertaining treatment of an opera that brings its fair share of problems to any company, and the chief virtue of Opera North’s presentation (a co-production with Gothenburg Opera, now seen in the UK for the first time) is the wonderfully well suited casting.This is the 1916 version of the piece, the scenario adapted to position the Prologue (the first Act, essentially) in a 20th century film studio (Fellini's, the programme book tells us), rather than a wealthy dwelling in the Vienna of the past.Forget the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
We’ve now reached film 31 and Phase Five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s increasingly baroque franchise. Four years after Avengers: Endgame’s false finale, Scott Lang aka Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) is still basking in his role in reversing Thanos’s genocidal Blip, and reacting to the MCU’s version of the pandemic by semi-retiring from Avenging for some Me time.Until, that is, his wife the Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), their now adult daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) and original Ant-Man Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) ill-advisedly contact the Quantum Realm, and the whole Ant-family are sucked into its Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For Dave Brubeck, his Quartet’s first concert in the Netherlands was memorable. Getting to Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw for the 26 February 1958 booking was difficult, possibly unfeasible. The band were travelling from Berlin, and arrived at the show a half-hour after they were meant to be on stage.The adventure is described by Brubeck in his note for 1958’s The Dave Brubeck Quartet in Europe album (a live set recorded in Copenhagen on 5 March: pictured below left). A blizzard had hit Berlin and all flights out were grounded. They got onto one for Düsseldorf, from where they’d have to take a Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
It’s 1986, and a young Sonia Boyce (main picture) speaks to poet and sculptor, Pitika Ntuli, about the "perpetual struggle to be heard and appreciated" as a Black woman who is an artist. "I’m here, you can’t wish me away," she responds with characteristic verve and fight. Cut to 2023, to the UK debut of Boyce’s award-winning Venice Biennale installation Feeling Her Way, and the same concerns about visibility, audibility and laudability remain at the fore of her work – but with a golden, gleeful difference.Spread across five adjoining rooms in the Turner Contemporary, Feeling Her Way Read more ...
India Lewis
Jockstrap’s crowd, in the vaults of Heaven, was always going to be beautiful and effortlessly cool. Ushered in by a ticket-check clerk sporting love bites, the dreamy sounds of the warm-up act, Pablo, filled the underground space. The audience, already packed in, swelled to full capacity over the night, singing along and swaying to a heavy, bassy throb. Jockstrap themselves were excellent, but played through each song without talking to the crowd, which at times made it feel as though they were just running through their new album (with a few other hits thrown in), a not uncommon feeling Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“He’s my best friend, a brother,” says Felice Lasco (Pierfrancesco Favino) of his childhood buddy, Oreste Spasiano (Tomasso Ragno). After 40 years away, Felice, a successful, married businessman, has returned to Naples from Cairo to see his aged mother (Aurora Quattrocchi).He hasn’t seen Oreste since he left at the age of 15. No letters, no phone calls. Nostalgia can be dangerous. A clue: Oreste is now known as Badman. Shades of Elena Ferrante’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay.In Italian director Mario Martone’s intensely atmospheric, compelling film, Felice walks the ancient streets with Read more ...
Gary Naylor
For many years, I would ask groups of students to vote in elections because “it’s important to honour those who gave up so much to ensure that the likes of us can”. Some would nod, others would shrug, a few might have inwardly scoffed – too cool for school, innit? Kate Prince’s long-aborning musical Sylvia illustrates how our (near) universal franchise was won and the emotional and physical cost levied on the pioneers who won the argument in Parliament and on the streets.Ben Stones’ set doesn’t give us much to work with – the dark greys on even darker greys suggesting the bleak Read more ...
Jon Turney
All the things going on with me as I type this – fingers moving keys, eye and brain registering characters on my screen, thoughts that will (I hope) generate the next lot of characters – rely on electrical signals.So much has been common knowledge since scientists built clever enough detectors to show nerve impulses, and brain waves. And electrical technology has been applied, with more enthusiasm than finesse, in procedures like electroencephalography (EEG), reading the waves, and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), giving them a good thrashing.But they are many decades old, and today we Read more ...
David Nice
It’s not often that the most bittersweet moment in a rich concert comes in the encore. Elisabeth Leonskaja had already played the generous extra in question, the Dumka movement of Dvořák’s A major Piano Quintet, with the Staatskapelle Quartet only a fortnight earlier. Here, fine-tuned with the Jerusalems, that moment when the joyfully flowing episode turns dark and the piano seems to call from a dark wood proved sheer magic.There wasn’t a moment in this concert where anyone in the audience could (or should) have lost concentration, The Jerusalems’ art is flexible, almost improvisatory in feel Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Marcel the Shell the Shoes On tells the story of a one-eyed little shell who lives with his grandmother Connie in a house that became an Airbnb after its former occupants divorced. The man inadvertently carried away Marcel’s extended family in a drawer when he left. Marcel pines for them, and he tugs at our heartstrings more relentlessly than should be allowed by a one-inch carapace animated by stop motion.If that suggests I’m resistant to Marcel’s winsomeness, it’s not true. He's as adorable as adorable gets. As in the 2010 trilogy of shorts that made Marcel a YouTube “fee-nom" – as a human Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is new writing becoming increasingly literary? Recently, some of the language being used by younger playwrights seems to me to be becoming too subtle, something to be savoured on the page rather than strongly felt in live performance. Certainly, this is true of Ava Wong Davies’s Graceland, which was a winner of the 2022 Ambassador Theatre Group Playwright’s Prize, having been developed as part of an Introduction to Playwriting group at the Royal Court, where it gets a studio production. Although this 75-minute monologue has moments of perception and beauty, it is more writerly than raw.The Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I once gave Peter Doig a tutorial, when he was a student at Chelsea College of Art. He had little to say about his strange images and I came away feeling I’d seen something unique, but was unable to tell if he was a very good painter or a very bad one. He now enjoys international success and his paintings sell for millions of pounds yet, judging by his Courtauld Gallery exhibition, my ambivalence was well founded. The show contains a sublimely beautiful painting and two very bad ones. The Alpinist 2019-22 (pictured right) is Doig at his very best. A lone skier trudges up a snow covered Read more ...